Manufacturing Execution Systems (MESs) are routinely used to plan, schedule, and manage production or other operations in industrial plants. In order to effectively plan, schedule, and manage an industrial plant, one or more models are typically used to provide a description of the plant in both a physical (structural) domain and a procedural (behavioral) domain. Multiple variables that have relationships with a multitude of process elements may be present in both of the domains. However, conventional data models are typically unable to efficiently represent or handle the variables present in both the procedural and physical domains in such a way to efficiently model the industrial plant.